Linda Valdez has been writing commentary for The Arizona Republic since 1993. A graduate of the University of Arizona, she worked at The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson before coming to the Republic.She has won numerous state and national writing awards. In 2011, she won the Scripps Howard Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. She is author of a book, "A Doctor's Legacy," which tells the life story of Merlin K. "Monte" DuVal, the man who founded Arizona's first medical school at the University of Arizona. She has done commentaries on radio and television in Tucson.Valdez has been married since 1988 to a wonderful man who immigrated from Mexico. They have a beautiful daughter.

The difference between Tucson and Phoenix politicians? The ones from Baja Arizona show a little good sense. (Sen. Al Melvin providing the exception that proves the rule.)
When it comes to bringing a little sanity to discussions about guns and safety, Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik has been a voice of reason – and a source of heartburn to those who think the Second Amendment trumps all other rights in these United States.
Koz is at it again.
He has a op-ed in today’s Arizona Daily Star that calls for applying a “public-health model” to discussions about gun violence.
He writes: “A study conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association late last year reported that between 2007 and 2010 there were more than 121,000 firearm fatalities in the U.S., including more than 73,000 firearm suicides and more than 47,000 firearm homicides. Mortality rates resulting from most major causes of injury are decreasing. That is not true in the case of annual firearm fatalities.
Eighteen states have voluntarily joined the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). That is a database that is being gathered to allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to provide decision makers with data to help address mortality rates associated with gun violence. The CDC uses a public-health approach to studying the data. It’s about prevention and pragmatism, not dogma.”
Arizona does not participate in the NVDRS, he writes.
Arizona’s GOP-led Legislature may not want to clutter up its thinking with facts.
While Koz talks sense south of the Gila, the GOP's SB 1063 aims – once again – to allow guns to be brought into any public building or event that does not provide gun storage.
Maybe it’s the water in Tucson that results in this desire for facts.
Too bad the air on the GOP side of the Legislature is not more conducive to clear thinking.

First, get the terminology right: It’s “sexual orientation,” not “sexual preference.”
I have a preference for white wine over red wine. That’s a matter of taste.
But my orientation is something else.
I knew I was heterosexual when I was 8 years old and a boy named Jimmy helped push my doll carriage down the sidewalk. I wouldn’t have known what to call it, of course. But when he said, “Someday, we’ll get married,” I said, “OK.” I told everybody about our plans, which subsequently fell through.
Wendell Hicks, executive director of the Southern Arizona Aids Foundation, says he knew he had a different orientation when he was in third grade. He didn’t have a name to describe it, either. But he knew he shouldn’t talk about it in the small eastern Texas town where he grew up.
When I fell in love as an adult, all we had to do to make it official was get a license and find a justice of the peace. It was quick, inexpensive, and it brought legal recognition and social status. Community property, too!
Hicks, 52, says he and his partner spent the better part of a year putting together a trust with the help of a lawyer. It wasn’t quick. I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. But it is what they had to do to protect each other’s right to the home they share.
That’s not fair.
It’s not right that I was perfectly free to be a boy-crazy teenager, while his orientation left him feeling that he had few choices in a society that stigmatized who he was. Should he move away or just die? Come out and hope the family is accepting? His parents were.
The law isn’t.
There’s a growing social acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Hicks expects things to get even better in the future. I agree.
The reaction — the unified, instant, gale-force reaction — to Arizona’s right-to-refuse-service bill demonstrated that.
The question is: What should we do now?
Instead of going back to sleep after the nightmare of Senate Bill 1062, Arizona needs to be proactive on behalf of civil rights.
Our state needs to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, and it needs to legalize same-sex marriage.
These are not radical ideas. They are, in fact, a logical progression along the “arc of the moral universe,” which, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “bends towards justice.”
Businesses, politicians, faith leaders and average folks raised their voices in opposition to a law that was designed as a pre-emptive strike against equality. They should not shut up now.
If SB 1062 was wrong — and it was — then the status quo is wrong, too.
“You can be fired in the state of Arizona because of who you love,” says Hicks.
A few years back, the pastor of my old church asked a 100-year-old woman what she’d learned during her long life. She stopped her wheelchair in the middle of the aisle and yelled out, “God is love!” She was quoting the Bible.
Allowing the far-right conservatives to hide behind religion in order to erect barriers to equality is wrong. So is pretending everything is OK now that Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the latest monster her GOP-controlled Legislature produced.
There are real people whose lives are diminished by old prejudices against anybody whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual. Those who are hurt are relatives, co-workers and friends. They are human beings who deserve compassion and respect. Now.
Arizona demonstrated that it is not as mean-spirited as the members of the GOP majority in its Legislature. We killed their homophobic monster.
Now, let’s get the laws in line with the simple, decent truth that a person’s sexual orientation should not reduce his or her rights under the law.
Reach Valdez at linda.valdez@arizonarepublic.com.

A study in contrasts – or Your Federal Dollars at work.
A newspaper in McAllen, Texas, reports that HUD is providing $2 million in grants to stimulate job growth and business in poor, rural areas along the U.S.- Mexico border.
Meanwhile, Worldbulletin News reports that an Israeli company that provides security along the wall between Israel and the West Bank has won a $145 million federal contract to secure the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona. The one-year contract could swell to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst Brian Friel.
The project involves observation towers with sensors and command-and-control centers. Sound familiar? Let’s hope they do a better job than the boondoggle called SBI-net, which cost about a $1 billion before it was abandoned as ineffective.
The larger question is this: What do you think will result in the best long-term bang for the buck? Spending to enhance life and commerce along the border? Or creating a no-man’s land?
Empowering people always pays bigger dividends. Too bad that’s not where the big federal dollars are headed.

New name, same pain for children. What used to be called “risk factors” are called “adverse childhood experiences” in a new report on how bad things are in Arizona.
They include what hits kids directly, like neglect or physical, sexual and emotional abuse. They include the glancing blows from having a mom who abuses drugs or dad in prison. They include the lack of nurturing because a parent is depressed, mentally ill or suicidal.
These are heavy burdens that last a lifetime.
Scientists have known that for years. Now there’s more evidence.
Research that’s been going on for decades at the Centers for Disease Control was customized for Arizona thanks to Phoenix Children’s Hospital. The study found that Arizona ranked among the worst in the nation for kids who face multiple adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. This manifests in a range of measurable childhood problems, such as poor health, obesity, school absences and school failure.
The physical and mental responses to childhood stress don’t magically go away at age 18. “As the number of ACEs in a young person’s life increases, so does the likelihood of cancer, depression, diabetes, alcoholism, smoking, heart disease and other conditions that most often show up in adulthood,” the report says.
The cycle of dysfunction repeats when a depressed mom is unable to nurture her own child.
The report is being unveiled today by a team that includes Charles Flanagan, Gov. Jan Brewer’s point guy on reforming child welfare. It is being offered up with breathless anticipation that it will make a big difference. It has an optimistic name: “Overcoming Adverse Childhood Experiences: Creating Hope for a Healthier Arizona.”
But hope is no match for the chainsaw of Arizona’s GOP-controlled Legislature, which would rather call itself “pro-family” than actually put up some cash to help families.
Child care subsidies, child abuse prevention and substance abuse treatment are strategies to strengthen families. They get scant funding now. How will they fare if the child welfare system is remade on a law enforcement model, as Brewer’s people seem to want?
The vast majority of child welfare cases involve neglect, not criminal abuse. Helping parents – teaching adults who grew up with multiple ACEs how to be parents – could make a difference. It could reduce those risk factors – oops, I mean adverse childhood experiences – that are passed on to a new generation.
Kids need what most parents instinctively provide. Nurturing. Stability. Warm fuzzies. Clear boundaries. Government can’t do any of that, as the GOP is fond of saying.
But smart, well funded, compassionate state policies can help parents triumph over the ghosts of their own adverse childhood experiences so they can break the cycle and be better parents.
This new report says it’s a matter of “pay now or pay later” because of the long lasting impacts of bad childhood experiences.
“Research on the biology of stress shows that being exposed to ‘toxic’ levels of stress harms the developing brain and other organs,” the report says.
But prevention has always been a hard sell at the GOP-controlled Arizona Legislature.
This is one more piece of scientific evidence that Arizona’s GOP-controlled Legislature will find a way to ignore, dismiss or ridicule. Ask them about it.
So have a good cry for the kids. Or elect enough Democrats to make a real difference.

When is murder not murder? When you kill your own baby daughter, apparently.Nina Koistinen pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and domestic violence in the 2013 death of her 6-day-old child. She admitted suffocating the infant.Her sentence? One year – 12 months -- in prison and four years of probation. “Nina has suffered from bipolar (disorder) and schizophrenia and depression, and we have tried for years and years to manage it," her husband of 15 years, Bradley Koistinen told the court.He said she’d been the “greatest mother.” At least up until she killed the infant, who was the couple’s ninth child.The life of this baby was tragically devalued by the justice system. But why did a woman who was clearly on the edge kept producing children at a dizzying clip?She belonged to a church that condemned birth control, according to one former member of the Phoenix Laestadian Lutheran Church. After the baby was killed, homicide detectives found that Arizona’s child welfare agency had contacts with the family several years earlier. The mother had talked about wanting to suffocate some of her children. She thought she had too many.I feel sorry for this woman, who needed mental health care, not sermons and pregnancies.But mostly I feel sorry for the infant, whose life was deemed worth two months of punishment for each day she lived.

Gov. Jan Brewer got it right when she said, “Religious liberty is a core American and Arizona value, so is non-discrimination.” Her veto message regarding SB 1062 was remarkably eloquent. She did not pander to the extremists in Cathi Herrod’s camp.Arizona has strong protections for freedom of religion. But the civil rights of all people are not protected.Instead of earning national condemnation for a bill that made a preemptive strike against gay and lesbian rights, Arizona could have raised its stature by extending protections against discrimination to include sexual orientation. The cities of Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff have done that.Some say it’s too much to expect from state lawmakers. It’s time to raise our standards.

Just look at the parade of prominent Republicans urging Gov. Jan Brewer to veto SB 1062. Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich.But the Rodney Dangerfields of Arizona’s latest embarrassing act are the Democrats. Since everyone expects them to oppose something that smacks of officially sanctioned discrimination, they get little attention for doing so. Pity.I watched the House debate on the bill. The Democrats – who all voted against this measure in the House and Senate --gave impassioned and impressive arguments against the bill.Reps. Ruben Gallego and Mark Cardenas offered numerous amendments – all voted down by the GOP – that sought to point out the potential for unintended consequences. For example, one amendment specifically spelled out that law enforcement or police departments couldn’t use the provisions of the bill to discriminate against members of the LGBT community. The GOP rejected it.To this, and other amendments, GOP Rep. Eddie Farnsworth pointed out that the LGBT community was not a protected class under state law, so nothing would change for them under the bill that allows “sincerely” held religious beliefs to be used as a defense for refusing service to anyone.This is a key point: instead of passing a bill that could hurt gays and lesbians by negating protections extended to them by the cities of Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff, lawmakers should be adding sexual orientation to the list of those protected from discrimination.If Democrats ran the state, that’s where the action would be on this issue. In addition to Gallego and Cardenas, Minority Leader Chad Campbell and Reps. Demion Clinco, Victoria Steele and Bruce Wheeler were among the Democrats who spoke truth to the majority Republicans during the debate. Democratic candidate for governor Fred DuVal was quick to condemn the bill, as were many other Dems. If Democrats ran the state, Arizona could move beyond these endless, wasteful, hurtful debates that suck the energy from real progress on education, infrastructure, economic development, health care, child welfare.But Democrats don’t run the state. Meanwhile, Republicans get outsized credit for urging Brewer to veto a bill that would never have become law without Republican support. Go figure.Poor Democrats, they can’t get no respect.If they got a more votes in upcoming elections, however, Arizona might become known for something besides dunderhead legislation.

The Center for Arizona Policy is effective at the Arizona Legislature with an agenda that is all about limiting options for other people.The group, which has a disproportionate power over Arizona’s GOP lawmakers, pushed the right to refuse service bill, SB 1062, which elevates some peoples’ religious views over other peoples’ civil rights.That’s a perversion of the First Amendment, which is designed to protect religious expression from government intrusion – not to affirmatively promote or support certain religious views.With any luck, Brewer will veto this latest travesty from the center.If not, SB 1062 will likely wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court, where one of the center’s other pet projects just met a well deserved dead end.In 2012, Arizona’s GOP-controlled Legislature passed a center-backed ban that disqualified any entity that provides abortions from receiving public funding for other services. The unnamed target was Planned Parenthood, which has provided a wide range of other services to Medicaid patients.Lower courts said the law violated federal requirements that Medicaid patients be able to freely choose a qualified provider. Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Tom Horne took time out from defending himself from allegations of campaign funding shenanigans to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.Just in case there was any doubt that is was about religion -- not health care -- the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom joined in defense of the law that limits the options of all women – not just those who might share the group’s religious beliefs.On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected Horne’s request to hear an appeal of the lower court decisions. Religion can be a fine and important part of people’s lives. But these zealots are giving it a bad name. What’s more, like health care, people should be able to choose their own religious beliefs.The kind of legislation pushed by the Center for Arizona Policy and passed by Arizona’s compliant GOP majority in the Legislature does not reflect the diversity of religious beliefs or the right of people to make choices free of restraints imposed by other people’s religious beliefs.

People are raising concerns about how their food is produced. Food producers are defending the status quo.Arizona was on the cutting edge when voters outlawed gestation crates for pregnant sows in 2006. Done? Get lucky. Arizona lawmakers are now pushing a bill to outlaw the kind of undercover investigations that put those crates in the spotlight.Arizona is part of another effort to say no to a method of food production that agri-business finds efficient and profitable: genetically modified crops. There is another slap-back from agribusiness.This time the practice being targeted is not about cruelty – unless you count the alleged collateral damage to weed-loving butterflies from dousing herbicide-resistant GMO crops with weed killer. The objections to GMOs are more philosophical.“I didn’t sign up to be an experiment,” says Tucsonan Jared L. Keen, who is suspicious of studies that suggest GMO foods are safe.He’s running a “fully grassroots” effort to get an initiative on November’s ballot that would require labeling food that was developed using bioengineering. Right to Know Arizona (righttoknowarizona.com) needs to gather 172,809 signatures by July 3. Doing that without paid circulators is a daunting task. What’s more, Keen says he’s been told by two national pro-labeling organizations not to expect any funding help. He says they are focusing their resources on labeling efforts in Oregon, where the chances of success are considered higher.But wait: Arizona is a proven leader on the “you are what you eat” front. What’s more, it would be nationally significant for GMO-labeling to win here in Conservative-ville.“Passing this in Arizona would send a real message that this is not just a blue-state thing,” Keen says.In fact, the call for labeling GMO food crosses the political spectrum, and it has agribusiness is paying attention. The response? Change the playing field.More than two dozen crop, food and biotech groups formed the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food to ask Congress to order standards drawn up for a voluntary national labeling program that would – surprise, surprise -- preclude states from mandating labels. Nothing prohibits voluntary labeling now, and the FDA has issued “guidance for industry” suggestions for labels.Arizona’s Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva is co-sponsor of an effort introduced last year to mandate standardized federal labeling (HR 1699). Industry objections to mandatory labeling include cost, inconvenience and the fact that labeling might make people think genetically modified food is not safe.About 70 percent of processed foods currently contain GMOs, so the stigma argument is a little hard to buy. This is about your right to information. Meanwhile, Arizona’s intrepid Legislature cooked up something to shield agribusiness from the kind of scrutiny that led to the ban on gestation crates. Twin bills, HB 2587 and SB 1267, are ostensibly about the very real problem of animal hoarding. But that’s pure bait and switch.These measures weaken protections for livestock and require anyone with video or other evidence of animal cruelty to turn it over to law enforcement within five days. That last provision is aimed at the public’s right to know what’s for dinner.People became aware of the horrors of sows in gestation crates largely because of undercover videos made by animal rights activists. Their exposes have also revealed stomach-turning scenes from slaughterhouses, chicken houses, veal farms and other places where animals are apparently not regarded as sentient beings.Because it takes time to demonstrate a pattern of abusive practices, requiring videos to be surrendered in five days dooms the kind of undercover operations that embarrass agri-business.These twin bills, which are supported by the Arizona Farm Bureau, are about protecting the livestock industry from scrutiny and accountability. That’s wrong.The public has a right to look deeply into meat, egg and milk production practices that evolved with little scrutiny. Demanding videos to be turned over in five days is not the way to increase industry openness.Pigs and plants are not the same. Cruelty to animals is unacceptable, even if the animal is being raised for meat. That’s non-negotiable. Producing food with bioengineering, on the other hand, may be a perfectly acceptable practice. But some people don’t like it. They should have a choice.State efforts -- like Keen’s initiative -- are a prod to get the feds to enact a uniform, mandatory GMO labeling standard. No wonder agribusiness is trying to get the feds to block state laws.Voters in Washington narrowly rejected a GMO-labeling bill last year, and Californians rejected one the year before. In both cases, food, chemical and biotech firms spent millions to defeat the measures. The pressure’s on and Big Food knows it.“We’ll do our best to make it happen here,” Keen says. “In the process, we’ll educate a whole lot of people.”E-mail Linda.Valdez@ArizonaRepublic.com read her blog at Valdez.azcentral.com and follow her on Twitter @valdezlinda

Profile in courage: Today on the floor of Arizona’s House, Tucson’s new Rep. Demion Clinco stood as a gay man in opposition to a bill that would allow businesses to discriminate against the LGBT community on religious grounds. After noting that the bill – if signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer – could result in him being denied service by a taxi, Clinco said: “I don’t think we deserve a bill like this.”It is “hurtful,” he said to a bunch of Republicans who probably don’t care. It’s “appalling” to hide behind arguments that this bill is about defending religious freedom, he said.The bill is, as Minority Leader Chad Campbell said, “a direct attack on the LGBT community.” The legislation, which previously passed the Senate, passed the House and will go to the governor.Clinco stood up for the humanity of gays and lesbians against the majority of Arizona’s GOP-controlled Legislature. A losing – but necessary – battle against those who stand firmly on the wrong side of history.Will the governor use her veto in support of human rights?A thin – but necessary – hope.

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